I see my first ever boss, Geordie Greig, has been nominated as the editor of the London Evening Standard by the new owner of the paper, playboy oligarch and former KGB spook, Alexander Lebedev.
I’ve interviewed Lebedev in Moscow. He is a strange man. Not your typical Russian oligarch at all. He’s something of an outsider in Putin’s government, despite having worked as a spy abroad (he was based here in London during the 1980s, and his job was to monitor capital flows from the USSR).
He’s much closer to Gorbachev, and the two own one of Russia’s few independent newspapers, Novaya Gazeta. People were worried Novaya Gazeta would lose its teeth when a KGB man bought it, but no, it still seems full of brave journalists – one of which was gunned down in Moscow in mid-January, while walking with a human rights lawyer.
The thing that struck me about Lebedev was how wowed he was by British society. He enthused about a dinner he was at in London, where he sat between Tom Stoppard and Tom Wolfe. His son Evgeny is even more of a butterfly, and he could be the one in the driving seat at the Standard.
What will be interesting is how the paper will report UK-Russian relations, next time Russia is in the news for some aggressive action (shouldn’t be long now), particularly if it took place in London, like the Litvinenko killing. I don’t think Lebedev would sit by and let the Standard slag off the Kremlin, as one previous editor, Max Hastings, is fond of doing – he referred in passing to Putin as ‘Russia’s chief Mafia capo’ in a Mail article last week. Not sure that would wash with the new proprietor of the Standard.
